Projects Update #2

Qlandkarte GT
After getting past the minor issue of having no access to the internet on QEMU, I have managed to get most of the dependencies, including manually building GDAL for AArch64. However, there is one that keeps giving me issues, and it's QtWebKit. The only binary package of QtWebKit for AArch64 available at the moment is for Fedora 21(Rawhide), which would have probably been fine if there wasn't a conflict of libpng versions between the new QtWebKit and slightly older QT4-devel. QT4 uses libpng15, whereas QtWebKit (F21) uses libpng16, and they can't seem to agree. I have been offered a good solution for that issues and that was to try and build QtWebKit for AArch64 from source, using a fedpkg branch of an older Fedora release, since the lib dependencies shouldn't make a difference, and this way they would be compatible. Unfortunately I haven't been successful while rebuilding from *.src.rpm to binary rpm (getting this wall of errors), and this is once again where I am stuck on trying to get it to build on AArch64.

I have also contacted upstream about testing and benchmarking the program on X84_64. I was told by project administrator Oliver Eichler that "as QLandkarte is an event driven application with no permanent need to compute data there is no general benchmark system to supervise performance", but he also told me that the area that always needs optimizations is the rendering of the map, especially with a very large amount of way points or trackdata. I have yet to take a look into that, and hopefully I'm not in over my head on this part. So even if I can't build it on AArch64, I can at least try and make some adjustments that would benefit the performance of map rendering of the application.

GCC-XML
After looking at Traverso, I got a feeling that I might have bit off more than I could chew and decided to change direction for my second project. I chose a command line tool GCCXML which produces an XML description of a C++ program from GCC compiler's internal representation. This is to ease the task of other development tools that work with C++ programs by avoiding the C++ parser.

So far attempts at building it for AArch64 haven't been successful, but I am in the process of figuring out the details. Figuring out which area to focus my efforts on for optimization is to follow shortly after.